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Really 'OUTSIDE the BOX'

How about making your own plastic blanks.. All you need is some food coloring, A LARGE supply of Styrofoam peanuts or other scrap Styrofoam and a tiny bit of gasoline, When I say tiny I do mean tiny like 1 oz.

put gas in a can add Styrofoam a little bit at a time while stirring constantly you will be amazed at how fast gas eats Styrofoam. Keep mixing until you have about 1 qt of very stiff material roll out into oversize pieces (sp) and let dry a few weeks. If you live in the warm south about a month will do all depends on how stiff your mixture was to begin with.

It will cut like a medium hard wood, sands very easily and can give you all types of weird color and swirls.

In rural S.A. they use the gas and Styrofoam as a caulking material on thier little fishing boats, as they have the gas and the foam is washed up on shore from wherever.

Marty

Reply to
Triker3
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40 years ago I read you could make napalm out of gasoline and styrofoam. I haven't any idea why I wanted to make napalm, but it didn't work anyhow; the foam just floated in the gasoline. Maybe it works better now that the lead is out of the gas. Or maybe the foam I was using wasn't styrofoam.
Reply to
Toller

No, it works. I used to do a lot of construction work for a very eccentric wealthy fellow several years ago, and he had a huge quantity of styrofoam in one of his garages, of the type you'd normally find in packaging. He didn't want to pay to rent a dumpster for it, so he handed me a civil-war replica sword, and asked me to chop it up and dissolve it in gasoline to make it smaller. I got paid the same rate either way, so I went ahead and did it. Turns out you can fit a garage worth of foam into a 5 gallon can that way.

Afterwards, he mentioned the napalm thing, and we burned about a 1/2 cup of the stuff on in an old tire rim on the parking lot. It burned, but it certainly wasn't all that exciting- you didn't miss out on much.

I would think that in the case of the "home made plastic", the gasoline would evaporate quickly enough, and it wouldn't be much more flammable than regular foam.

BTW, if you still want to make napalm for some rediculous reason (and sometimes the reason is just for the sheer hell of it- I know. It's hard to resist goofing with things just to see if they really work,) I've heard that a better way to do it is to float a tub of gasoline in a hot-water bath so that it works like a double-boiler and stir in glycerine soap flakes. Sounds dangerous to me, but if I ever actually needed napalm for something, it seems more credible than adding foam.

Reply to
Prometheus

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